NVIDIA 337.50 Driver Comparison

NVIDIA 337.50 Beta Driver Comparison Introduction:

As the quest for more performance rolls on, both AMD and NVIDIA are working hard behind the scenes to really drive game performance with significant driver optimizations and the use of new APIs such as AMD's Mantle. These optimizations seemingly always find the magical 10+% performance boost month after month, and there has to be a break-even point somewhere, right? You would think at least, but here we go again.

NVIDIA has delivered its latest driver set, the 337 series, that looks to deliver performance gains across the board with some significant targeted gains in games using both single and multiple DX11 capable GPU combinations. What that means is that instead of relying on a new API for a performance boost, NVIDIA is showing that using the current DX11 API it can deliver performance optimizations that boost performance in all games. Further providing that all inclusive gaming experience, NVIDIA has included GeForce Experience 2.0 in this driver release that now has been updated with profiles for 150 games.

When you look at the potential gains, you may or may not see the maximum benefit in some of the games you play. I say potential because the list below says "UP TO" X%. The only way to truly know what you will see is to test these combinations and come up with a reasonable conclusion as to how the drivers perform on a current high performance build. To do that we will use our OCC video card test bed and run a few of the combinations through a few tests to see how well the new 337.50 beta drivers perform.

GeForce GTX 700 Series (Single GPU):

Up to 64% in Total War: Rome II

Up to 25% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Up to 23% in Sleeping Dogs

Up to 21% in Star Swarm

Up to 15% in Batman: Arkham Origins

Up to 10% in Metro: Last Light

Up to 8% in Hitman Absolution

Up to 7% in Sniper Elite V2

Up to 6% in Tomb Raider

Up to 6% in F1 2013

GeForce GTX 700 Series (SLI):

Up to 71% in Total War: Rome II

Up to 53% in Sniper Elite V2

Up to 45% in Aliens vs. Predator

Up to 31% in Sleeping Dogs

Up to 20% in CoD: Black Ops 2

Up to 10% in Hitman Absolution

Up to 9% in F1 2013

Up to 7% in Far Cry 3

Up to 6% in Metro: Last Light

Up to 6% in Batman: Arkham Origins

The OCC test bench consists of the following components and is fairly representative of a high end gaming machine that a good portion of the enthusiast and gaming community is equipped with. Not to mention these cards are in the targeted card segment and make up both the mid and upper end of NVIDIA's GTX Gaming series cards. I will be using Batman: Arkham Origins, Metro: Last Light, Far Cry 3, Battlefield 4, and Star Swarm as the games of choice in this comparison. As seen above these games can see gains of +10% in a single card configuration, so should prove to be useful comparisons.

Let's start with the low end and look at what the GTX 750 Ti gives us in terms of performance gain with the 337.50 drivers. The games were run at the same setting as the more capable GTX 770 and GTX 780 Ti, with the exception of the Star Swarm test where the High preset was used instead of the Extreme preset.

To start off, the results of my GTX 750 Ti testing showed an increase in performance in three of the five game tests. BF4 and Metro: Last Light both saw about a 2.5% boost in performance. Star Swarm, an exercise in how to boost performance with a new API, shows the biggest improvement at roughly 11.5% over the previous driver version. In Batman and Far Cry 3 we did not see an increase in performance with this card. Let's see how the more capable cards run in a single and multi GPU configuration run, and if the results are comparable.